The Bilingual Acquisition of English and Mandarin: Chinese Childr ...

Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1. The Effect of a Bilingual Context

What is the conceptual and linguistic effect of the special experience of one child’s having two languages from birth on the very essence of the idea of person identification and pronoun development? This book attempts to address the effect of a bilingual context on children’s acquisition of person identification and their breakthrough to pronoun reference, especially how children name themselves and how children make the transition from nominal to grammaticised pronominal forms. The study investigates personal pronominal reference to self, addressee, and nonparticipant in which the child’s pronominal input comes from two typologically distinct languages, Mandarin and English, in the context of that child’s overall early word learning and syntactic development in two languages. Monolingual syntactic development in areas such as word order and subject realisation is discussed and compared with this bilingual child’s development. The implications of my findings for the